Generally, electrical power demand has been on the rise throughout the world. However, in view of typical economic constraints, it is not normally easy to expand power transmission and distribution proportionately. Because of unplanned overuse, grid assets (particularly, transformers) are increasingly failing before reaching their rated life, which could be 20 to 30 years, or even longer. Since power transformers typically represent highly critical and expensive assets, their premature failure can result in huge economic losses to utilities.
Generally, there are conventional approaches to problems such as those just described, and these mainly involve monitoring the health of transformers, life cycle assessment of transformers, and the monitoring of overloading of transformers due to mismatches between generation and load. Such approaches do not consider real-time pricing, revenue earned on a real-time (e.g., daily) basis, and loss of transformer life on a real-time basis. (“Realtime” as used herein means current or contemporaneous in time, e.g., at least one realtime parameter is at least one contemporaneous parameter.)